For starters, you need to know the gearing strategies for Ulduar tanking. And they're different than Naxx:

Heart of the Wild nerfed to 10% stamina means you need stamina more. Don't go nuts on this, but you will need to have a good amount of stamina and you'll probably have to regem some of your gear or use certain choices.

Things hit like a semi carrying a truck carrying small missiles. Seriously, most everything hits like Patchwerk's evil big brother on meth. You can reasonably expect to take 20k-25k hits from bosses, and there are plenty of special abilities that do far more than that.

With the loss of armor, you need EVEN MORE stamina. Seriously.

Also, with the loss of armor, more armor is a bit better. So armor as a stat improves greatly on a lot of these fights.

Threat is actually important for druids. Other tanking classes have much better threat now, but druids are still a bit far behind. This means that you can't just ignore hit and expertise on your gear in Ulduar; there will be fights where your threat really matters.

DPS stats matter a little bit for SD, but not insanely so. While Savage Defense is decent, it's not a substitute for armor. 100 AP means you prevent 25 damage, which would be (from the above boss) equivalent to .125% mitigation. So don't go nuts here. But do get some. And uptime is more important than raw mitigation most of the time, so go for crit if you're going for any specific DPS stat.

In general, this means that you should look for leather with a high amount of stamina but still some good amount of agility, good hit/expertise, sockets and good socket bonuses. Some AP and crit thrown in for good measure is also good.

Also note that for socketing, the Shifting Twilight Opal is finally here. This helps a lot. In general, my strategy for socketing gear will be the following:Blue sockets will have straight Solid Sky Sapphires.Red with have Shifting Twilight Opals.Yellow will have Vivid Forest Emeralds or Enduring Forest Emeralds if I need the socket.That's for straight tanking gear. For gear that I can use as a piece for DPS without having to regem/re-enchant, I'll go with straight agility gems. This would be the chest, feet, gloves, and belt for me; it might be different depending on your professions.

Just like before, I'll provide a weighing on wowhead that you can use to re-evaluate the gear. I'll also discuss them here so you can see them a bit.

Also note that the tier 8 bonuses for bears are basically pointless. There's no reason to go for the tier gear for the set bonuses. As you'll see, though, the main reason you'd want them is because the stats are just insanely good for bears.

Finally, I'll be updating this page as we get more information about what gear is out there. This will be the post for Ulduar loot analysis on a macro scale. If you know that more gear has been added, this is where you should find where I rank it.Here's the comparison from wowhead. That's for armor only. Note that this does not do a good job with trinket weights based on procs or on on-use mechanics.

Onto the analysis. Anything in italics is available in 3.0.8 and earlier. In general I tried to include as many reasonable items from Ulduar as I could. When (easy) or (hard) is listed, it means that that item drops from either an easy mode encounter or a hard-mode encounter if there is an option. If there is no option, it is not listed.

And yeah, for right now I have very little of an idea of where exactly things drop. I'll revise this in the coming days ahead and make it a bit more accurate.Back:

No real updates to this, as we already knew the better in-slot pieces. Cloak of the Shadowed Sun will remain a situational piece because of the high armor, but either the Titanskin or the Drape of Icy Intent are good replacements. If you have the Shadowed Sun I wouldn't replace it until either one of those dropped.

UPDATED 5/13: Predictably the hard mode item looks best, and a bit behind it is the pvp gear. Thorim is probably the easiest hard mode in Ulduar (note: I did not say it was easy, merely the easiest) which means that there's a decent chance at getting this chest at some point. Also, this isn't a huge upgrade by any means; valorous to conqueror gives 4 points of an upgrade. This shouldn't be as high a priority.

I had forgotten quite how bad the foot itemization really was. The leatherworking item really isn't that much stronger than the Vile Deceit, and it's going to be very expensive and rare to get early on. I'm very much hoping that there are better pieces than this. The PvP gear is very close in every way to the Runed Ironhide, and should be much easier to obtain - and even has the highest stamina possible save for the Polar gear.

UPDATED 5/13: Fate's Clutch is a very nice second ring after the coil for anyone. And again - drops off of Hard-mode Thorim. You and him are going to be best of friends. Leviathan's Coil should make you drool quite a bit. It's crazy good for a bear. Platinum Band is also quite nice, but it's hard to beat that 882 armor. If you've already got Gatekeeper and Keystone I wouldn't upgrade until you get Leviathan's Coil or Platinum Band, depending on what your expertise is. Anything below Keystone Great Ring can be reasonably ignored for tanking purposes, though Metallic Loop is a good ring to pull double duty in tanking and DPS.

Even with the emphasis on agility in the weighings, the pvp gear comes out ahead. This is also one of the easier pvp pieces to obtain. Furthermore, gloves are far better optimized in T8 than T7 - this should be one of the earlier targets for you to obtain an upgrade in. For raw stats it's not really comparable. After that - many good choices this time before we hit the older content gear. The T8.25 piece is great for both cat and bear and is well itemized this time around. Most everything else just doesn't cut it, but if you have to I'd try and get the Gloves of the Stonereaper; they'll be close to best for cats if they don't work out perfectly for bears.

UPDATED 5/13: As expected, the Furious Gladiator helm hits the top spot here. And it's head and shoulders (ugh) over the competition. It's also the hardest pvp piece to get outside of the shoulders. If you can hit 1900 rating, this should be a top choice to get. It's amazing and annoying how high Hood of the Exodus is here, given that it's never, not once, dropped for our guild. Still, if you have it you don't have to look for much upgrades going forward, and chances are the T8.25 helm will be very good for a while given how much stamina it has. Garona's Guise is probably a sidegrade for the most part; the threat is stellar, but the lack of stamina puts it below the other options.

UPDATED 5/13: While the Furious legs are still the best, the T8.25 piece is remarkably close. It also shows how bad the T7 legs really were for what they were; even the deadly piece ends up beating the T7.25 legs. Legs should likely be one of the higher priorities for you to upgrade in Ulduar.

Note that I left a lot of pre 3.1 items off of this because there were so many. Anything under 30 points can safely be ignored for tanking. And no, you shouldn't roll on the Bronze Pendant of the Vanir unless all the other tanks have it. Honestly, if you already have Boundless Ambition I wouldn't roll on much of anything here. Note: Don't be an idiot and pass up on Mark of the Unyielding if it drops from normal and you can roll on it. It's very good, no matter how you measure it. (this is what I did earlier this week)

UPDATED 5/13: Wow. Those are some impressive shoulders for killing Steelbreaker. This is by far the biggest upgrade at any slot that I've seen; fully 17 points from T7.25 to this and 15 points over T8.25. The tier gear is horrible by comparison, but those off-spec items are stellar for bear and the best overall upgrade in Ulduar save perhaps for Idol of the Corrupter.

Well, all the tier gear can't be THAT good all the time, right? In this case, it's the odd looking shoulders that aren't that big of a deal. If for some reason you wanted to keep your T7 bonus, shoulders would be a really good option.

I didn't include the profession trinkets, though they rank between Heart and Essence. As always, trinkets are very encounter-heavy, but the Heart of Iron is an amazingly high-itemized piece that all tanks will covet. Sadly even though the parry is useless, the Royal Seal will still be one of the best trinkets for ferals. The General's Heart is a nicer version of Valor Medal and Essence. DM:G still remains one of the better avoidance trinkets, and adds armor. Defender's Code is still very strong in certain situations such as hard-hitting mobs - and trust me, there's plenty of those in Ulduar.

UPDATED 5/13: The belt slot for some reason got changed more than any other with the whole re-emphasis on stamina. And man, does this show how bad the itemization was for this slot before. That said, the soul-devouring cinch is one of the best itemized things in the whole game, especially for bears. The Furious PvP gear actually loses out here, though it being easy to obtain means that it might be worth it to go for. Given that the Soul devouring cinch comes from Yogg's hard mode, I'd say it might be a while before it's obtained.

I would still recommend considering something a bit more agi and DPS-friendly in this slot, and gemming accordingly. The craftable Death-Warmed belt does a really good job of everything save perhaps having any hit/expertise, but even without that it's very strong, and is a reasonable thing to spend those runed orbs on.

UPDATED 5/13: The fluxing Energy coils are a decent thing, but because they're hard to obtain (XT hardmode on 10-man) and they're not that special as far as itemization goes, AND the PvP bracers are easy to obtain and almost as good...sorry, guys, you don't get the recommendation.

Ah, the wrist - the other bastard itemization son of Blizzard. One normal Ulduar, only one piece in general...chances are there's a lot more to find here. I wouldn't bother rolling on the Mechanist bindings. There's going to be something better.Weapons:

UPDATED 5/13: The Furious staves have been nerfed from their original ridiculously high values - but even with that nerf they're better than Origin of Nightmares and still best in slot. If you're wondering where Dark Edge of Depravity or Dreambinder are - they're not in Wowhead yet, so they don't show up here. Dark Edge should be the better overall tanking weapon for ferals, though for pure mitigation/survival nothing is going to beat Origin. Dark Edge should likely be better for threat as well, given that nice amount of hit.

I am also likely going to revise this when those weapons hit wowhead, because the amount of armor that origin provides is simply not being counted well enough here.

If you're curious, it drops from Yogg-Saron's hard mode. Dreambinder drops from any hardmode, though it came originally from Algalon.

That's it. If you have your old Terror, that's as good as it gets. It's a huge upgrade, mind you, but that's it. And yes, if you only do 10-mans you're out of luck. If you don't get lucky, you're out of luck. It's a very bothersome situation, but there it is.

Thanks again for reading, and I'll be updating this as the week goes on.

56 comments:

"The Druid community has been surprisingly quiet regarding the mechanics of Savage Defense. [...] One of the most practical relics of theorycrafting this new tanking mechanic would be a set of stat weightings that could be used to create a prioritized gear list."

So.... nice timing :P Obsolete part of my post before I even click 'publish'! :P

Karthis - heh. I had to edit a whole bunch of my 'reasons why druids are the best OT' when you posted, so it's only fair. :p

And on SD weighings...the real truth is that SD just doesn't contribute meaningfully enough on mitigation to give particularly high weighings for, well, anything. I probably overbudgeted for it in this sheet, but in general SD will contribute about 4-5% mitigation overall. In order to increase that by 1% more (as an example) you'd need 800 AP or about 10% more crit. For certain fights where you know you'll be dealing with a lot of adds, it's going to be stellar and you should choose gear appropriately. For most of Ulduar? Things just hit way too hard.

Dont be too quick to tell everyone how to gem/enchant before we've even stepped foot inside the instance - in live. Its easy to make assumptions based on numbers, not experience. Having said that, my preference is a little more stam too - but I'm not overdoing it. The original motivation was because our stamina was way too high: that doesnt necessarily mean we have to compensate for the nerf by stacking stamina, know what I mean? I guess we'll see, but 20-25k hits dont sound too bad. healers may not be used to it on non-patchwerk fights... but they'll get used to it pretty quick. Most healers have been snoozing through naxx right from release date last year. Maybe at last we've got the harder raids we've been asking for. Doesnt necessarily mean we have to panic re gearing.

Anyway, I'll let you know how I get on. My bet is that I'll not notice anything different from pre 3.1, and any of us tanks will get "one-shot" as much as any other in the first few weeks, no matter what gear strat we used.

Avoidance is at an all time low in ulduar and is next to virtually uselessPlease don't spread this around... last thing us healers need is more non-druid tanks thinking that being uncrittable is optional >>... you have known no pain until you take a warrior with 370 def into heroics...

Also, I'm not sure I agree. If things hit like a truck and you have little-to-no avoidance... you're gonna get hit like a freight train each and every time they hit. Consider Patchwerk--we all agree he hits like a truck, but most tanks are avoiding a good half of the hits (my druid's dodge on patch 25 is usually right around the 45-50% mark, so I assume it's at least that or around that for most people). Now consider healing through someone who only avoids 25% of the hits. Sure, you need the stam to take the 50% of the hits, but that doesn't mean you should sacrifice all semblance of avoidance.

Seleria; Firstly, what does avoidance have to do with being crit immune? Secondly, there's no way in hell to get a feral druid tank down to 25% avoidance bar taking off all gear. What we're talking about is something in the order of going from 50% avoidance to 45% in order to regem stamina and possibly hit/expertise. That's on average 1 more hit every 20 attacks, or according to the current swingtimers that have been presented, around 1 more hit every 40 seconds or so. If it helps deal with getting hit twice in a row, it's worth the trade.

Sounds interesting, looking forward to getting new gear of course. Im not sure about all this stamina thing though. I'm going to at least wait and see, and have some spare dragons eyes in my bags just in case. The testing re tank balance was such a mishmash of inconclusiveness from guilds trying to figure out boss strats before anyone else. Players insisiting this or that, and many players contradicting each other. I tanked several bosses on the ptr, easy modes, with my normal avoidance set. And I wasnt even JC at the time. No problems at all.

I'm always suspicious of players who think they have it "figured out" based upon this intentially brief foray into ulduar, so Im inclined to distrust most of it. They're not doing us any favors by being dogmatic, though in their own minds they're saving everyones days. Now if you're talking about hard modes, thats kinda silly. I'd expect we'd need to be geared in Ulduar gear before beating all of them. Otherwise everyone's going to be whining for new content by the end of April. See you there!

I figure 152 dodge (which might be up 1/3 of the time) is better then 54 stamina. Dropping 1k health when at 45k dosnt seem much whereas getting maby 3% dodge (or 6% lesses damage at 50% avoidance) when you need it seems more appealing (granted it is only up 1/3 of the time but it is up when you are low).

Well, I'm going to try it out before coming to any major decisions about how much stam to stack. Hopefully K (???) will create a tanking ulduar post where we can all post our experiencecs tomorrow! I prefer these druids blogs for discussion, since tankspot is so warrior centric. You can always regem gear for stamina too - EH still reigns supreme for progression. Pity you have to use the commendation though - JCs have it really lucky atm, stamina wise. I even know a druid alt with the 2 JC trinkets equipped, all socketed with +41 gems. There are also stam enchants out there (bracers, pure stam to boots) if you're not using them.

Anon1 - I'm going to aim for the ability to have 40-45k depending on the encounter. Most bears when they log in tonight will have around 35-36k health after the nerfs and whatnot, so I expect some regearing will be needed. Currently my tanking set has 45k health, but a lot of it is already set to max stam because it's also the gear I use for sarth3d.

JohnD, thanks for writing. I should've been more clear initially, and I'll go ahead and update it. The long and short of it is that I'm not going to go for pure stam everywhere, but I am adding more stamina. On any shared pieces I'm going to try and make them pure agility. So my chest, gloves, belt and boots will be agi; the rest will be the heavier stam mix. That way I'll be able to have a "Twilight Shifting" level of gemming/enchanting overall, but individual pieces will be heavy stam or heavy agi depending on how tank or DPS-centric they can be.

Also keep in mind that as soon as you log in, you'll be losing about 4-5k health. So it's not a trivial loss.

Samuel, thanks for writing. And stamina is not the nonentity that it was in 3.0. Between the vast majority of bosses hitting harder and the nerfing of HotW, more stamina will be pretty well required.

Darksend, thanks for writing too. I very much vehemently disagree with the EH theory nowadays and I think tankspot is pretty poor for trumpeting it all over the place without really thinking about it. Ulduar will have fights that greatly favor avoidance over raw HP; hard mode Hodir is a great example, as you simply cannot throw healing at it to beat the enrage. Your tank can't stack stam either. Thorim's another great example, where dodging unbalancing strikes gives a big advantage if you can do it, and you can't reasonably stack high enough stam to soak the hits. Some fights will like more stam, but others will want something else entirely. Research, think, and be flexible.

Seleria - exactly. :)

Shamad - if Darksend were promoting that I'd agree with you. He's actually going more towards the "All polar gear, all the time" - which just won't cut it in Ulduar save for Hodir normal mode.

Anon2 - that's a good point. My gearing strategy comes from the points I mentioned - that armor is down, things hit hard, and health is down. These things point to me towards a more stamina-centric view than before. How you meet that is really up to personal preference.

Anon3 - it really depends on the fight. Trinkets are always very fight-dependent. In general I'll be wearing the essence of gossamer and the DM:G, but some fights I'll go DM:G/Valor medal, Essence/Commendation, DM:G/Defender's code, or even DM:G/grim toll. There's no one right answer. For the biggest bang for your buck in general, Essence/DM:G or Essence/JC trinket is likely best.

no no no, I think polar gear is the biggest abomination in all of warcraft. I would never use it except on fights where I have to offtank a significant amount of magic damage (such as ignis I will almost certainly be using it but that is a special case).

My progression set is the normal gear, 4t7+ hood of exodus, the belt from UK, loatheb boots, gatekeeeper and keystone, essence and the JCing trinket, thrusting bands, shadowed sun cape, and boundless ambition.

What I mean is that no socket bonus is worth matching. Straight up unless it is a blue socket or you are a JCer, you should have 0 socket bonuses. Also stam enchants everywhere, bracers boots gloves chest shoulders.

Sorry I feel I need to elaborate more. Everything I talk about is gems and enchants.

I think the biggest sin as a tank is to have a mixed set. Meaning if you want avoidance you get the minimum amount of EH needed and then nothing but agi after that. And if you want EH then nothing but stam gems everywhere.

If you have 1/2 your gems as 24 stam gems and 1/2 your gems as 16 agi gems, then what are you really accomplishing.

Furthermore. I have enough gear to have 4 full sets of t7 that are completely independent. I have a chest with a 10 stats enchant an 8 hit 8 agi and an agi stam. I have another with 10 stats 16 agi and a 27 agi prismatic. I have a third one that is 24stam and 41 stam with the 18 stam armor kit.

Same with boots. I have 2 sets off loatheb boots. 1 is a 16 agi enchant with a 16 agi gem the other is a 22 stam enchant with a 24 stam gem.

Like I said, Darksend - you're leaning towards the all stam, all the time. I would much rather have a dodge enchant than a pvp stam enchant on the shoulders, for example. Same with boots, gloves and chest. Itemization wise you're losing value there, and you're losing the ability to use multiple sets of gear for different purposes.

And I think that's going to end up being flawed; that much stamina isn't that useful. Again, it's not what EH preaches, but I think blindly following EH theory is simply wrong.

I think the biggest sin as a tank is to have a mixed set. Meaning if you want avoidance you get the minimum amount of EH needed and then nothing but agi after that. And if you want EH then nothing but stam gems everywhere.And that's great if you have multiple sets of the best gear handy. If you don't for whatever reason, you may have to be a bit more generalistic.

And my strategy for when I can only have one awesome piece per slot is to be more generalistic. Specifically, go for max stam on the pieces that I know will go for bear-only, and go for max agility on the pieces that I can share with cat.

hehe, you know this sort of argument always happens while the servers are down and we're waiting for a patch. It *always* happens each time. Well, I'm with you all in the waiting and frustration.

I also prefer a mixed set to straight stamina. Stamina is such a boring stat to stack. My sarth3d gear looks terrible, and is a total joke, stat-wise. 300,000 stamina and not much else. At least till we find problems in ulduar related to the set I'm wearing, that's what I'm going to do.

I dont know how people can talk about "biggest sin" - that's a massive exaggeration (I can thinker of greater sins - progression tanking while specced resto comes to mind, lol). That attitude assumes there's one way to play warcraft - which is *my* way, goddammit. Plus, the point doesnt make much sense. Its just what one player likes to do. Seems like he/she missed the memo about the existence of other playstyles.

Haha, well, I promised a quick report back. I'm sure everyone will say razorscale doesnt count, he's too easy, but he was the only non-bugged boss last night after Flame. On that fight, at least, druid health + armor was utterly irrelevant to the fight. The fact that we do a lot more damage than warriors or pallies did count (for speed of add killing).

In fact I as the druid, was pretty much the last to die everytime as we learned the encounter. When we finally got him down it was clear - as always - that strat + player skill are where the encounter is at, not el oh lol "how much stamina does our MT pack" Theorycrafting - while I'm sure is a nice hobby for people when they cant get online - has nothing to do with game success :P What I took away from a really fun evening was that people learned and played really well. And no one whined about nerfs.

Theorycrafting - while I'm sure is a nice hobby for people when they cant get online - has nothing to do with game success :PAnon, congrats on your Razorscale kill. I would obviously take some major issue about the above statement; two quick examples of where theorycrafting made things much better were doing flame tanking on Illidan and using resistance on Sarth3D. I've gotten many mails and comments on people using gearing strategies similar to what I posted and finding success when they didn't before. Does that mean you have to do it that way? No.

You are right - skill of the player will almost certainly trump poor gearing choices. And for the most part, bears will be fine for the normal modes of Ulduar. That's not where the challenge of the encounter will come from except in a couple of cases, and in those couple of cases (Hodir, Thorim) bears can at least make one part a lot easier.

Does it mean you should regem stuff for all stamina right now? Well, some. Having less than 40k health buffed is probably not going to work well on some of the normal mode fights like Ignis or Mimiron or Hodir or Thorim. Or Vezax. Don't go crazy with it. But don't discount it either.

Please, come back when you've done a few other bosses in Ulduar and let me know what your experiences are. I'd appreciate it.

I will keep you informed of progress. Sorry I was being a little silly; of course math has some relevance to success, and I'm grateful for your illidan flame tanking information too:) You do some great work on how druids can perform really well in certain encounters.

Hard modes will be hard. If hundreds of guilds think they can compete hard modes in naxx gear during the next week or two... well, blizzard will have failed to give us what they promised. As usual, I suspect the best guilds will do them quickly because they always do... and they'll probably use warrior MTs in most cases, because... they always do.

For the rest of us mortals... I very much doubt any testers gave 2 hoots about gear progression and ulduar farming status when they made their pronouncements of class difference. We havent even seen a lot of the gear available. Actually, I'm almost certain. I read their comments; the only consistent feature across the endless difference of opinion was a lack of playtesting evidence.

There are players from most spec categories who are equally worried about their ability to be of any use in hard mode ulduar. Many passionate, dedicated players have exactly the same worry, from one patch to another. I think it's a consequence of people's passion for the game more than a proof that all specs & classes need buffing.

Didnt mean to belittle anyone's work, again I apologize if I did. I was pumped up with our success, knowing that we played well together because we're a tight knit group, and havent been slacking off the last few weeks. Some of our players didnt even graduate high school.

Ah the joys of playing on a high pop raiding server in the EU. Servers up at 17:00 or so, then down, then up again, killed one boss, Ulduar locks up, dc's, everyone gets ported to Dalaran and we decided to call it a day.

Samuel, I think 3300 stamina should be fine when you're fully buffed and otherwise set. I don't think you'll face that much issue.

Though to be clear, the only reason I'd just yellow gems is if the socket bonus made sense. A lot of the current gear (like the Valorous) doesn't make sense for that - for that stuff, I'd just go pure stamina or pure agility a lot of the time.

And Shamad, we start raiding tonight. We don't bother raiding on Tuesdays; too much instability. :) I think a few folks went anyway and played with the FL vehicles, though that part's a cake walk. It's the massively bugged Ignis and Razorscale and XT-002 that have issues. Sigh.

Another night... another boss down. Good luck to you all too! They're not bugged anymore as far as I can tell: Razorscale was never bugged, XT has had its trash packs disabled on our server at least, so you can go straight from Razor to him, no trash at all. Its been so much fun.

Ahhhhhhh you cant beat that progression tanking feeling, man! I came late to WoW, so this is actually the first time in my wow life I've even MTed progression content. When there are still hardly any strats available. Its awesome and a precious precious time I wont forget :)

Druids with our huge health pools (I'm sporting 45k with the JC trinket + 3 bold dragons in normal valorous) are still awesome, actually. I'm consistently the last tank to die. Maybe my guild is just too nooby that they need a tank with high health to get a boss down. But so far, the evidence has shown me that druids are in great shape. Yes, I know its still easy mode... But I just want to point out that many guilds on the official forums spoke about sitting their druids for this patch because we were so broken.

The issue, they say is "we are too broken to be of any use in hard mode ulduar" and the truth is that no guild has gotten to hard mode ulduar yet. Also, we've made ridiculous mistakes on our kills simply through not noticing some key element of the encounter. I'm suspecting that some of these ptr stories are just that - anecdotes from careless players who just jumped to entirely wrong conclusions about what just happened with a boss noone currently knows.

I cant help worrying we'll have cleared the place in normal mode by next week unless !@#$ gets significantly harder. We have a top 20 guild on our server who are at General atm... and to be fair, the difference between them and other guilds is just the number of hours they spend playing, the lack of a day job (of course!) and willingness to consume obscene amounts of caffeine.

The issue with bears on hardmodes is supposedly that they put out weak threat meaning DPS will start to catch up if they actually know how to hit those buttons(I've been seeing the same already in some t7 content when someone bothers to really give it their best on Tenebron...) and that they have weaker mitigation cooldowns meaning a Warrior or DK will require less healing and be easier to keep up overall.

I guess we'll see whether the issue - which hangs on the word "supposedly" - is actually real. Shamad werent you one of the bears being "sat" by your guild. What have you been up to the last 2 days? Getting bored, or is the argent tournament keeping you busy while the better tanks in your guild clear Ulduar?

Guild has been running with DK/Prot Warrior/Prot Paladin tanks, and I've actually been asked to switch classes completely bringing up my Priest as my new main and being a dualspec disc/shadow priest for us. Sadly we're really not running any bears tanking atm so can't say much about that.

We did 10mans yesterday and earlier today and the group that has been more active is currently somewhere past Iron Council. Started 25man raiding today and I'm a bit dissapointed we bogged down on XT after doing Lev and XT very fast. Problems on XT were raidhealing related, and we're trying to address those now.

Just a thought, but I like lootrank.com much better than wowhead for comparing item weights. It does the gems more correctly. Maybe you could even get them to publish your ideal bear and cat weights as a standard template.

The nice thing that I've found is that 10mans - when we're geared in 25 man gear - feel significantly easier than 25mans. That's very satisfying, because that's something Blizzard promised.

Oh - interestingly, we also got stuck on XT last night after blasting through Razorscale. (blasting through FL in hard mode is rather like blasting through Chess in kara - free lootz for all, yeah!) ... too many deaths from Xts single target attacks. I cant diagnose why, because I was MTing the whole time (apparantly the bear was easier to heal than a warrior, and I had 5k more health, lol... so much for all the nerfs)

beable, I've been very annoyed by lootrank in the past. It's okay for certain things, but I've found it to do weighings really bizarrely and not be up-to-date in items compared to wowhead.

Ultimately, you should use Rawr. That'll be the best tool. Toskk's sim and FeralByNight are two other good tools. Nothing compares to a tool for determining what is best for your individual situation. I do loot lists because those tools don't help a ton when looking at gear drops or figuring out gearing strategies.

I don't have a good scale for cats yet. I'm still wanting to see how the armor pen bug and that works out. For now, I'll be taking any cat-only gear I have and converting it to arpen, and any shared gear will have agi. They're very closely ranked.DaveP - Bears are going to be easier to heal than warriors or paladins for quite a few of the normal-mode fights. That's because the higher than warrior/paladin armor and high HP come into play a bit more early on. The issue I've had isn't that druids won't be tanking anything, it's that they're likely not well-suited for the harder modes, where cooldown usage makes a very big deal. This is primarily a problem with DKs more than anything else, but keep in mind when you get to Mimiron - a warrior or DK will make your life a LOT easier in P1.

Yeah, you're undoubtedly right about Rawr. I've used it a bit in the past, but it annoys me with its whole piece 1 + this gem, then piece 1 + this other gem, then piece 1 + yet another gem combination stuff. Maybe that was just default behavior that I can get rid of.

What I really need is one of these weight comparison sites to allow me to say "I've got that" and save that information. Then I won't have to have a huge Google doc spreadsheet like I do now.

Beable; arpen was buffed for 3.1, but it's bugged so that the benefit is smaller than it should be. Stacking arpen is going to be key for physical dps in 3.1, as it gets better the more you have of it.

Well, if Dks continued to be OP for every single hard mode encounter, I'm sure they'll be enough consensus quickly enough, that it'll get fixed. Also remember that accessing hard modes for the majority of players is going to take longer than a couple of weeks. I suspect for all players actually. I think they're tuned to require you to farm Ulduar for several weeks before you can get to some of them. I doubt many guilds - like ours - in the top 500 will even have normal mode on farm for several weeks. The first 2 bosses we've done - razor & XT - hit like trucks in easy mode. And the fights are pretty sensitive to player preformance. The less skilled players who've been carried through much of wrath so far are now more apparant.

So that's plenty of time for Blizzard to make adjustments. Its something they have their eye on now more than ever.

Sorry for being so blunt, but may I ask you a question regarding 10man Ulduar? My Guild and I have been debating this for a while now and couldnt figure out whats stalling our progression.

For Ignis we had our Resto-Shaman switch to Moonkin as he was the only one who could reliably kill and root those ADDs and our MT switched to healing while I was then tanking Ignis.

With 40k hp/40k armor and 53% post-DR avoidance (45% dodge, 8% miss) I usualy didn't survive any prolongued time while two adds where up, thus buffing the Boss. On the other hand the Paladin, with slightly better gear and a more skilled Tree healing him had little to no problems whatsoever survivng with 4 adds being up.

Where my stats too low, or was it the switch from a experienced Tree to an rather unexperienced Holypala that what caused us to wipe?

Hey Kalon im not sure if you have herd of me most havent but im the feral tank from perdition on QD when ever u get the chance id like to talk to you ingame about some stuff it would b nice to finaly have another feral to bounce ideas off of :D

on another note sessari i find that we as druids can take alot of punishment but prenerf ignis had a ton of fire dmg added in due to a bug were each add also increased the fire dmg alot its been fixed but b4 then i wanna say pallys had more spell mitigation for some reason i cant really remeber thats why it prbly seemed he cld handle it better

Beable - the issue with armor pen was that it appeared that it wasn't providing enough value. With the new armor pen calculations provided by Ghostcrawler, it looks like it's right on the money. It does mean that it's slightly less valuable than was thought, but it also appears to be at least as valuable as agility point-for-point, and gets better the more you stack it. And you're right - Bindings of the Tunneler would have made the list were it not for epic-only. I'll revise this ranking and the list in the future as we get more loot.

DaveP - DKs have already been nerfed. They're probably close to where they should be. I still expect warrior 4pT8 to be nerfed.

Sessari - I think a lot of it has to do with who is healing you. Some of it will be mechanical, like Spineshatter said, but some of it will simply be how on the ball your healer is. There's a lot of damage and chaos on the Ignis fight, so your healer really does matter and can't just stand there and spam. That being said, we found that in spite of me taking a lot less physical damage it was about as easy to heal our pally tank as it was me.

Spineshatter - hey, and good luck with the rest of Ulduar. :) I'm not in game all that often, but if you want to shoot me emails that's fine. If I'm on you're welcome to talk to me too - just can't always guarantee it, is all. And

DaveP- Ive tanked all the fights up to general except hodir and thor and did fine on all of them its true that DKs are alil OP right now but as kalon said they got nerfed im kinda disappionted in blizz for giving all my stam that i lost to the DKs though.

the only reason i didnt tank hodir is b/c its a 1 tank boss and im more usfull as a backup healer sense im in full t7 resto and i just kinda back up tanked thor while kitty dpsing on the side once the event was over

druid tanking really isnt bad at all right now i agree we took some hits to armor and stam and my personal TPS isnt the same as it was back in BC but im still finding that im a better choice then a warrior and that i can tank just as well as a DK/pally mayb a lil less TPS but it really dosnt matter if the raid isnt pulling off u

Mmo champ has new hard mode loot up. The only weapon I can see as being a great tanking weapon (aside from arena) is "Dark Edge of Depravity", a polearm from 25 hard mode Yoggie. Nice agi, nice stam and two sockets thrown in? Yes please.

Unfortunately I'm only in a ten man guild. No idol for me either. Just a question: Where would Furnace Stone rank in trinkets?

Also very sad..picked up the valorous t8 shoulders from Thorim..then found they are worse, but would have been an upgrade for the other druid and two mages I was with. Gotta love the lowering of stam as we go up a tier =S

I'm not being funny but for starters, you wont need 45k health to start in ulduar, I run at about 44k and tanked XT on 25 no problem, and secondly WTF is will all the PvP gear, yes its good, but if you just stack the pvp sets, then you are going to have fuck all hit and expertise which imo is bloody important, we had 6 wipes on Iron council 10 because one of the tanks taunt failed to get the second mob off the other tank and he died. And as for stacking stam yes its helpful, but I'd never sacrifice lots of dodge for health, Im running at 41.42% dodge with just Pinky paw, if I were to regem for stam i'd gain about 600 health taking me to 34.1/2k with paw, but Id drop to about 1% dodge, so at 33.6k health there is no way im taking 600 health over a full 1% dodge I just cant see the point.

I'm not being funny but for starters, you wont need 45k health to start in ulduar, I run at about 44k and tanked XT on 25 no problemI'm not sure I ever stated that 45k is the minimum, but it certainly makes certain fights much easier (Vezax without kiting, Ignis before the nerfs, XT before the nerfs, Thorim, etc).

and secondly WTF is will all the PvP gear, yes its good, but if you just stack the pvp sets, then you are going to have fuck all hit and expertise which imo is bloody important, we had 6 wipes on Iron council 10 because one of the tanks taunt failed to get the second mob off the other tank and he died.Okay, we'll dissect this as it's an important point.

First off, there's nothing that says that you can't have another set of gear that's tailored for hit if you absolutely must have a taunt work.

Secondly, expertise does nothing for you for taunt resists.

Third, taunts are based on spell hit, not hit, which means they require 17% total spell hit removal to be 100% effective. Which just doesn't exist on feral gear for the most part.

That all said - hit really isn't bloody important. Nor is expertise. Primal precision takes care of most of your expertise needs and most bears are swimming in expertise anyway. If they go for full pvp, that's still fine; they'll likely have it from jewelry anyway. Hit is less important than expertise except in the case where taunts matter - and in that case, you should equip hit gear and the glyph of growl. But the cases where taunts are Really Really Important aren't the common ones. There's IC (arguable), Kologarn, Thorim. Maybe Razorscale. Yogg if you do a tank switch. So on 4 of 14 fights, taunting is potentially important.

I didn't see these particular pants on the list so I thought I would throw them in... Leggards of Cunning Deception ..(http://www.wowarmory.com/item-info.xml?i=45536) They seem pretty well itemized for bear or cat and with three gem slots I would think you couldn't go wrong.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.